The present disclosure generally pertains to providing suggestions and online advertising to users of an online system, such as a social networking system.
Social networking systems enable users (including people, businesses, and other entities) to form connections and interact with other users. Social networking systems can also enrich the user experience by identifying, recording, and using the connections and interactions among the users to suggest actions or provide additional content. For example, a social networking system may infer a user's interest in a particular topic based on the user's interactions with objects related to that topic. In part, this information can also be used to select communications and advertisements tailored to fit the particular interests of each user. That is, advertisements and/or recommendations that are most relevant to a particular user's interests are presented to each user.
Advertisers typically provide compensation to the social networking system in exchange for displaying advertisements from the advertiser. Hence, advertisements presented to a user via the social networking system provide revenue to the social networking system while providing social networking system users with information about goods or services relevant to the users' interests. In addition to receiving compensation for displaying advertisements, social networking systems often seek to increase user interaction with the social networking system. This increased interaction allows the social networking system to obtain more information about its users or to obtain additional users. Increasing the amount of information about its users allows the social networking system to provide a better user experience and also to better identify advertisements of interests to its users, potentially increasing the revenue obtained from advertisers.
A social networking system may seek to increase user engagement or increase its user base by presenting “recommendation units” to its users that identify actions within the social networking system for its users to perform. Unlike advertisements, recommendation units do not directly generate revenue for the social networking system, but rather provide the social networking system with indirect benefits in the form of increased user engagement or an increased number of users. Further, the social networking system may generate recommendation units to encourage a variety of user activities, allowing use of the recommendation units to advance a variety of potential goals.
However, when presenting content to its users, the social networking system has limited display space to present both recommendation units and advertisements so that they are easily visible to the users. While the social networking system may allocate a fixed amount of display space for advertisements and a fixed amount of display space for recommendation units, for a given user at a particular time there may be more recommendation units relevant to the user than can be displayed in the allocated display space. Similarly, more advertisements than the amount that can be displayed in the allocated display space may be available for presentation. Additionally, advertisements are frequently evaluated based on the amount of revenue they bring to the social networking system while recommendation units provide a benefit to the social networking system that is not easily quantifiable and dependent to an extent on the goals of the social networking system. This difference in valuation for the different items makes it difficult to directly compare recommendation units and advertisements to determine how they are displayed to users.